Copia, Social Reading App/Network/Store, Comes Alive

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Copia, Social Reading App/Network/Store, Comes Alive

Copia, the social reading platform unveiled at CES in early 2010, is live. It won't be officially announced until next week, and it's still rough around the edges. Call it a public beta, call it a release candidate; it's finally ready for readers to see for themselves what it's all about.

I've spent a lot of time with Copia's private beta, which has gone through a handful of iterations building up to this release candidate. The idea behind it is great: Combine the social aspects of Facebook with the commercial aspect of the iTunes music store. But it's very difficult to get all of those parts working well on their own, let alone working well together.

This video from Copia explains the philosophy very well:

To try to make this vision real, Copia's platform has three parts:

a social-networking website, where you connect with friends and other readers of the same books to discuss what you're reading, share recommendations and ratings. To make connecting a little easier, you can sign in with a Facebook account, or create a separate Copia account. Once you're in, Copia can connect with LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

a desktop e-reading client for Mac and PC where you can buy books through the Copia store (EPUB with Adobe DRM, so you'll need an Adobe account) and read those books on your desktop or laptop. You can also read PDFs or DRM-free EPUB files in the client.

An iPad app that like the desktop, includes both your e-book library and the store.

Originally, DMC Worldwide, Copia's parent company, had planned to release a suite of multi-size e-readers in conjunction with Copia. Now, its plan is to expand its software platform to multiple devices, from the iPad to OEM partners.

So let me quickly walk you through the typical Copia experience. You get an account on the website and start connecting to friends. These can be one-sided or two-sided follows, like Twitter; so you could, if you wished (and users wanted to share) follow what a favorite author is reading or recommending.

You download one of the seven free books Copia's made available to new members. Some of these are pretty good – hey, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India! I don't have an e-book copy of that. Now, even though you can buy or select it from the site, you can't actually download it. You have to open up the desktop client for that.

So you download and install the desktop client and enter in your ID. Now you can download. Unfortunately, if you picked some books to add to your library that you didn't actually buy from the site, weird things will happen when you try to double-click it. Basically, the app assumes you're trying to download the book, can't find it in your purchase list, and spits out an error message. OK.

When you open up the e-reader, it's pretty typical stuff. There's no full-screen view, and zoom in/zoom out doesn't actually seem to zoom anything, but it does change your view from, say, one column to two. It handles annotations and notes that I can then beam up to the mothership in the website and keep synced across my devices – so long as I remember to press the big "Sync" button. It can't auto-sync anything.

The iPad app offers probably the smoothest experience: You can browse, download and connect without much of a hitch. But again, you need to actively sync your content between the website and desktop client, and there's a bit of a lag between syncing a book and it appearing on the iPad. If you've used iPad e-book applications like Nook or Kindle, there isn't much here that's new.

Copia actually turns out to be a really instructive case of why companies with great ideas and a clear vision don't always end up shipping the best products. It's not for lack of smart people, good design, or good code: It's about control.

Copia doesn't control any of the ends of book production or distribution. It has to deal with the book publishers, Adobe (who makes the DRM), the companies who make the devices, the App store who has to approve getting your software on a device (over which you have zero control of the date they finally approve an app for release). If you want to broaden your scope, to offer a wider range of formats on every device imaginable, that increases the complication by powers of ten. To try to make all of those partnerships cohere and still create a single, coherent platform without the established relationships or marketing clout to beat everyone into shape is nearly impossible.

E-reading is a particularly troublesome market to try to make a project like this work. Book publishers are if anything more conservative than their counterparts in the movie and music industries. They've been at this longer, and they've seen bad deals, failed formats, rampant piracy.

Book readers, too, are more conservative in their approach to these objects. They like simplicity. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been the most successful in this space because they offer one store, one brand, one experience. Sony, for instance, makes great consumer hardware, including great e-readers – but haven't been able to crack the consciousness in the way Amazon and Barnes & Noble have, because they aren't associated with books.

In the year since Copia was announced, Amazon and Barnes & Noble responded to the problems that Copia sought to address and integrated their own however-limited social functions into their products. They've done it with partnerships with existing social networks: Twitter, Facebook and Google. The NOOKcolor is arguably just as social as Copia already, exactly because it allows readers to hook into these extended social networks and full list of Google contacts, and do it fairly seamlessly, right within the e-reader.

That's the model both the content management companies and the social networks are pursuing, and it took them a long time to get there. Don't dry to jam too much content into the social network: bring the social networking logins and profiles to where people are using their content.

Likewise, don't spend most of your energy building social networking features into your content site. Let Netflix be Netflix and let Twitter be Twitter. No company should spend too much time and resources trying to do something it doesn't have the skills to do better than anybody else.

Even Apple – the master of controlling an end-to-end solution – has had to discover this with Ping, and to a lesser extent with iBooks. Steve Jobs just isn't all that interested in sharing things about himself on a social network, and he might love to read, but he's not all that interested in the publishing industry. Steve Jobs likes The Beatles. Let him have The Beatles.

I'm sure that in iteration after iteration, Copia will take all of the services under its control and make them work seamlessly with each other. And the big thing that it will force e-readers and e-book companies to do is to think hard about how they want to integrate social components into their devices.

Will it just be tweeting, "Hey! I read this, check it out!" Will be an open standard, like the proposed OpenBookmarks framework, that allow readers to share their annotations and bookmarks with each other no matter what devices they're using? Or will customers want richer connections – a space for virtual book groups, the ability to get to know strangers based on their shared affinities, browse their friend's libraries, consider their purchase recommendations? Could Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Apple implement something like this? Would they want to?

As it is, Copia isn't the future of reading, publishing, e-retail or anything else. (All of these claims have been made at various points leading up to its launch.) Right now, it's two things:

a solid frontend client for Adobe Digital Editions;

a very good proof-of-concept for how far you the social-network model can be extended into social reading.

That is not bad. If you're a reader, you should check it out; see what works, and see what doesn't. If you're involved in this business in some other capacity, see what you can use – or what another, hungrier company might use to try to take you down.